Cross-posted at Hawkblocker.This Dove commercial for hair dye is just fascinating.  It features a woman talking about what color means to her.  She observes that color is sensual, drawing connections between certain colors and the feeling of a cool breeze, the sun on one’s skin, a taste on one’s tongue, and more.  She says colors are moods: blonde is bubbly, red is passionate. The voice-over explains that dying her hair makes life “more vivid” and makes her want to laugh and dance.  She does it to invoke these characteristics.

She then explains that she’s blind.  The commercial uses her blindness to suggest that hair dye isn’t about color at all.  It’s about the feeling having dyed hair gives you, even if you can’t see the color.  “I don’t need to see it,” she says, “I can feel it.”

By using a woman who is (supposedly) blind, the commercial for hair dye uses the element of surprise to detach the product from the promise.  The sole purpose of hair dye is changing how something looks, but this ad claims that the change in appearance is entirely incidental.  Instead, dying one’s hair is supposed to make all of life more vibrant, every moment incredibly special, every pleasure more intense, and fill you to the brim with happy emotions.  It’s completely absurd.  Fantastically absurd. Insult-our-intelligence absurd.

And yet, it’s also exactly what nearly every other commercial and print ad does.  Most ads promise — in one way or another — that their product will make you happier, your life brighter, and your relationships more magical.  The product is positioned as the means, but not an end.   Most hair dye commercials, for example, promise that (1) if your hair is dyed to be more conventionally beautiful, (2) you will feel better/people will treat you better and, so, (3) your life will be improved.  This ad just skips the middle step, suggesting that chemicals in hair dye do this directly.

So, I’m glad to come across this utterly absurd commercial. It’s a good reminder to be suspicious of this message in all advertising.

Cross-posted at Native Appropriations.

Florida State has been the “Seminoles” since 1947, and have had a “relationship” with the Seminole Tribe of Florida for many years, but it was solidified more recently. In 2005, the NCAA passed a resolution, calling Native American Mascots “hostile and abusive,” and prohibiting schools with these mascots from hosting post-season events. The Seminole Tribe of Florida then officially gave their permission to use Osceola as the mascot, letting FSU get a waiver from the NCAA rule.

Disclaimer, and a big one — I am not Seminole, and I don’t want to speak for the tribe. I am offering my interpretation and perspective, but it’s just mine. I am going to be up front and say that I don’t agree with the choice to give the university permission to mock Native culture (see the billboard and video I posted earlier), and I don’t find a “stoic” dude in a wig and redface throwing a flaming spear“honoring” (see photo above), and I definitely don’t think that the “war chant” is respectful in any way. In fact I find it quite “hostile and abusive.”

I do want to put the decision of the tribe into context, however. From what I understand, prior to the formalized relationship with the tribe in the 1970′s, the image of the university was not Osceola (who is a real person, in case you didn’t know. Though the image is the profile of a white faculty member), but a stereotypical mis-mash named “Sammy Seminole” who was accompanied by “Chief Fullabull,” both of whom wore cartoonish and stereotypical outfits and clowned around at games. Trying to be more “sensitive” they changed “Fullabull” to “Chief Wampumstompum.” I’m not kidding. Osceola and Renegade (the horse) were introduced in the late 70′s.

So, by entering into a relationship with the university, the mascot now represents an actual Seminole figure, and wears (close to) traditional Seminole regalia, made by tribal members. In addition to control and “collaboration” over how the image is used and portrayed, I’ve heard the tribe gets a cut of the merchandising profits, which I’m sure is no small amount of money. The president of the university also established full scholarships for Seminole students (though only 8 Seminole students have graduated in the history of the school), a Seminole color guard brings in the flag at commencement, and the tribe was recently honored at homecoming. The Seminole of FL are also one of the most successful gaming tribes in the US, and my personal opinion is that keeping the state happy on the FSU front can only be good for relations around gaming contracts.

In summary, while the mascot is far from being respectful in my opinion, at least the tribe is gaining both economic and social benefits from engaging in this relationship. At least, at the games, as the student section is tomahawk chopping and yelling “scalp ‘em”, they can look down at the field and see a real Seminole every once and awhile to counter the image of Osceola. But is it perfect? Of course not. In a lot of ways it is similar to Derrick Bell’s theory of Interest Convergence — the idea that whites will only consent to racial progress when it benefits them directly — but turned around. The tribe is consenting to this, because they benefit directly. The interests of the two parties converge.

But the hard thing about FSU is that it always gives fodder to the mascot defenders. “But the Seminole approve of Florida State!  They don’t care!” Hopefully I’ve made a bit of a case as to why they’ve consented to have their image used, but I also want to point out that just because one faction of a marginalized group believes one thing, it doesn’t mean that everyone feels that way. Can you imagine if we expected all white folks to feel the same about a controversial issue… like gun control, for example? Not gonna happen. I also think that it ties back into the dilemma I’ve brought up again and again — is it better to be completely invisible as Native people, or be misrepresented? In the case of the Seminole tribe of Florida, they took the step to at least try and gain some control and power over how their people and community are represented.

For more, check out this awesome resource pulled together by Rob Schmidt of Blue Corn Comics/Newspaper Rock — offers more history, counter-arguments, quotes from news articles and Native scholars, and more: Why FSU’s Seminoles aren’t ok.

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Adrienne Keene is a Cherokee doctoral candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where she studies access to higher education for Native students.  She blogs about cultural appropriation at Native Appropriations.  You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

Why do women wear high heels?  Because men did.

Men were the first sex to don the shoe. They were adopted by the European aristocracy of the 1600s as a signal of status.  The logic was: only someone who didn’t have to work could possibly go around in such impractical footwear.  (Interestingly, this was the same logic that encouraged footbinding in China.)

Women started wearing heels as a way of trying to appropriate masculine power.  In the BBC article on the topic, Elizabeth Semmelhack, who curates a shoe museum, explains:

In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding epaulettes to their outfits…

They would smoke pipes, they would wear hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel — it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits.

The lower classes also began to wear high heels, as fashions typically filter down from elite.

How did the elite respond to imitation from “lesser” people: women and workers?  First, the heels worn by the elite became increasingly high in order to maintain upper class distinction.  And, second, heels were differentiated into two types: fat and skinny. Fat heels were for men, skinny for women.

This is a beautiful illustration of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class distinction.  Bourdieu argued that aesthetic choices function as markers of class difference.  Accordingly, the elite will take action to present themselves differently than non-elites, choosing different clothing, food, decor, etc.  Expensive prices help keep certain things the province of elites, allowing them to signify their power; but imitation is inevitable.  Once something no longer effectively differentiates the rich from the rest, the rich will drop it.  This, I argue elsewhere, is why some people care about counterfeit purses (because it’s not about the quality, it’s about the distinction).

Eventually men quit wearing heels because their association with women tainted their power as a status symbol for men.  (This, by the way, is exactly what happened with cheerleading, originally exclusively for men).  With the Enlightenment, which emphasized rationality (i.e., practical footwear), everyone quit wearing high heels.

What brought heels back for women? Pornography.  Mid-nineteenth century pornographers began posing female nudes in high heels, and the rest is history.

In honor of yesterday’s game, we’re re-posting two of our favorite football-related posts. This one and one about how much of a three-hour televised NFL games actually involves the game itself.
MontClair SocioBlog’s Jay Livingston posted the wickedly creative football play embedded below.  The play, pulled off by Driscoll Middle School’s football team (Corpus Christi, TX), is a wonderful example of the importance of a shared understanding of context.  Watch the clip:

Understanding the context of interaction heavily influences what you say and do and how you interpret others’ speech and actions. The behavior that you exhibit on a first date, for example, is very different than the behavior you exhibit in your professor’s office hours, or at Thanksgiving, or at a sports bar with your buddies. The situation shapes whether or not you can get away with bragging, farting, or being withdrawn, drunk, or loquacious.  And it shapes what we expect from others too.  In other words, we often think we know who we are, but who we are actually changes quite dramatically from situation to situation.

In this case, the offense did something entirely unexpected given the understanding of the context.  He isn’t supposed to just get up and walk through the defensive line.  And, so, when he did, the defense took several seconds to figure out what to do.  It’d be like your Grandma getting drunk at Thanksgiving (maybe) or your partner farting on the first date; such behaviors are confounding because it involves deviating from the script determined by the situation.  In Livingston’s words:

In this middle-school football play, the quarterback and center do something unusual for someone in those roles. They don’t violate the official rulebook, but their behavior is outside the norms of the game everyone knows. What’s going on? The defense looks around to the others for their cue as to what to do. They see the offensive line motionless in their stances, and they see their own teammates too looking uncertain rather than trying to make a tackle. So nobody defines the play as having started. But it has. Only when the quarterback, having walked past eight definitionless players, starts running do they arrive at an accurate definition, and by then, it’s too late. Touchdown.

See also our post about virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell in the subway.

The Ethical Adman’s Tom Meggison sent along a new ad campaign by Molson.  The campaign coins the word “guyet,” a supposedly masculine alternative to “diet.”

If dieting is working out in order to be thin, then guyeting is “working out to justify eating the foods you love… Bacon, nachos, and burgers.”

There’s a very simple thing going on here: things associated with women are NOT-FOR-MEN, so anything that rings feminine must be covered in bacon, dipped in beer batter, and fried masculinized. See, for lots of examples, our Pinterest page on the phenomenon with almost 100 examples.

Importantly, this isn’t just about maintaining a strong distinction between men and women, it’s about maintaining gender inequality.  We disparage and demean femininity, which is why men want to avoid it.  Listen to the tone of voice that the narrator uses when saying the word “diet” at 21 seconds:

Dieting is stupid ’cause girls and everything associated with girls is stupid.  Guyeting is awesome ’cause guys are awesome.

The reverse doesn’t apply. Women who do things men like to do — drink whiskey, play sports, become surgeons, have dogs, etc — somehow rise in our esteem.  Men’s worth, in contrast, is harmed by their association with femininity.  This is a layer of gender inequality above and beyond sexism, the privileging of men over women; it’s androcentrism, the privileging of the masculine over the feminine.  Since women are required to do femininity, it means being required to do trivial, demeaned, and disparaged things.  Meanwhile, men have to come up with stupid excuses for participating in basic healthy activities like going for a jog.

More posts on androcentrism: “woman” as an insult, being a girl is degrading, making it manly: how to sell a car, good god don’t let men have long hair, don’t forget to hug like a dude, saving men from their (feminine) selves, men must eschew femininity, not impressed with Buzz Lightyear commercial, dinosaurs can’t be for girls, and sissy men are so uncool.

UPDATE: Comments closed.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

The Wall Street Journal had an op-ed this week by Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry claiming that things are great for the middle class.  Here’s why:

No single measure of well-being is more informative or important than life expectancy. Happily, an American born today can expect to live approximately 79 years — a full five years longer than in 1980 and more than a decade longer than in 1950.

Yes, but.  If life-expectancy is the all-important measure of well-being, then we Americans are less well off than are people in many other countries, including Cuba.

The authors also claim that we’re better off because things are cheaper:

…spending by households on many of modern life’s “basics” — food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities — fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.

Globalization probably has much to do with these lower costs.  But when I reread the list of “basics,” I noticed that a couple of items were missing, items less likely to be imported or outsourced, like housing and health care.  So, we’re spending less on food and clothes, but more on health care and houses. Take housing.  The median home values for childless couples increased by 26% between just 1984 and 2001 (inflation-adjusted); for married couples with children, who are competing to get into good school districts, median home value ballooned by 78% (source).

The authors also make the argument that technology reduces the consuming gap between the rich and the middle class.  There’s not much difference between the iPhone that I can buy and the one that Mitt Romney has.  True, but it says only that products filter down through the economic strata just as they always have.  The first ball-point pens cost as much as dinner for two in a fine restaurant.  But if we look forward, not back, we know that tomorrow the wealthy will be playing with some new toy most of us cannot afford. Then, in a few years, prices will come down, everyone will have one, and by that time the wealthy will have moved on to something else for us to envy.

The readers and editors of the Wall Street Journal may find comfort in hearing Boudreaux and Perry’s good news about the middle class.  Middle-class people themselves, however, may be a bit skeptical on being told that they’ve never had it so good (source).

Some of the people in the Gallup sample are not middle class, and they may contribute disproportionately to the pessimistic side.  But Boudreaux and Perry do not specify who they include as middle class.  But it’s the trend in the lines that is important.  Despite the iPhones, airline tickets, laptops and other consumer goods the authors mention, fewer people feel that they have enough money to live comfortably.

Boudreaux and Perry insist that the middle-class stagnation is a myth, though they also say that

The average hourly wage in real dollars has remained largely unchanged from at least 1964—when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) started reporting it.

Apparently“largely unchanged” is completely different from “stagnation.”  But, as even the mainstream media have reported, some incomes have changed quite a bit (source).

The top 10% and especially the top 1% have done well in this century.  The 90%, not so much. You don’t have to be too much of a Marxist to think that maybe the Wall Street Journal crowd has some ulterior motive in telling the middle class that all is well and getting better all the time.

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Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University.  You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

SocImages News:

A huge “thank you” to all of the nearly 30,000 readers who liked and shared our post The Balancing Act of Being Female; Or, Why Women Wear So Many Clothes!  I’m thrilled that it stuck such a nerve!

In Twitter news, SocImages’ account reached 10,000 followers!

I’m also pleased to announce a new relationship with PolicyMic, a site dedicated to democratic media for the Millennial generation. I’ll be posting select stuff there.  (Special thanks to Sam Meier!)  I’ve re-started my blog on The Huffington Post as well.

Thanks, as well, to Jezebel, Racialicious, and Ms. Magazine for re-posting our bits about:

• how Geico dissed the lioness,
• the disconnect between young men’s and women’s hopes for marriage, and
• how racial minorities and immigrants are disproportionately put in private, for-profit prisons with few counseling and educational programs,
• among others.

Tonight at 7pm I’m giving a public lecture about hook up culture on the campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles.  If you’re in town and would like to drop by, we can convene for drinks afterward!

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

I have six talks scheduled for Spring. If you’re in Kingston, Boston, or Akron, I’d love to schedule a meet up!

• Jan. 31 — Occidental College — “‘The Night Overall Wasn’t Bad’: Oxy Students on Hooking Up”
• Feb. 26 — Queen’s University of Kingston — Hook Up Culture Lecture and Workshop
• Mar. 8-14 — Harvard University — “A Feminist Defense of Friendship”
• Mar. 27 ^— Ponoma College — “‘The Night Overall Wasn’t Bad’: What College Students Really Think About Hooking Up”
• Mar. 28-30 — Western Political Science Association (Hollywood, CA) — panels on “Public Intellectualism” and the “Twenty-First Century Sex Wars”
• Apr. 19 — University of Akron — “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

In Other News…

I was in Costa Rica this month and this — a wild sloth that came down from the trees to cross the path — was my favorite moment of the trip.  After he climbed into the forest on the other side, I actually burst into tears.
You would’ve too! Look at that face!!!

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog.

In the New York Times, Arthur Brooks argues that conservatives are happier than liberals.

Brooks starts with a reference to Barack Obama’s remark four years ago  about “bitter” blue-collar Whites who “cling to guns or religion.” Misleading, says Brooks.  So is a large body of research showing conservatives as “authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking.”

Despite that research, it’s conservatives, not liberals, who identify themselves as happy.  And, Brooks adds, the farther right you go on the political spectrum, the more happy campers you find.

Brooks cites a couple of surveys that support this view.  I was a bit skeptical, so I went to the GSS.

Sure enough, by about 10 percentage points, more conservatives identify themselves as “very happy” than do liberals.  The difference is even higher among the extreme conservatives.   As Brooks says, “none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity.”

Brooks cites two important factors linking political views and happiness: marriage (with children) and religion.

Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.*

I still found it hard to reconcile these sunny right-wingers with the image of bitter and angry Tea Partiers.  Then I remembered that the Tea Party is a very recent phenomenon.  To a great extent, it’s a reaction to the election of President Obama.    But Brooks is looking at pre-Obama studies of happiness.  The most recent one he cites is from 2006.  As the GSS graph above shows, Brooks is correct when he says, “This pattern has persisted for decades.”  But those decades don’t include the Tea Party.

Maybe conservatives were happy because until recently, they didn’t have much to be bitter about.  The US was their country, and they knew it.   Then Obama was elected, and ever since November 2008 conservatives have kept talking about “taking back our country.” (See my “Repo Men” post from 2 1/2 years ago.)

What if we look at the data from the Obama years?

Maybe that bitter Tea Party image isn’t such a distortion.  The GSS does not offer “bitter” or “Tea Party”  as choices, but those who identify themselves as “extreme conservative” are nearly three times as likely as others to be “not too happy.”  And overall, the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is hard to find.

For all I know, Brooks’s general conclusion may be correct, but the recent data do at least raise some questions and suggest that the political context is itself a relevant variable.

Nearly eighty years ago, Harold Lasswell said that politics is about “who gets what, when, and how.”  Maybe the lesson here is that if you are going to study the connection between political views and happiness, you should take account of who is getting what, and when.

*That’s a bit misleading.  Happiness is in fact related to income, race, and education in exactly the ways you would expect, though for some reason Brooks does not include those variables in his analysis.  What Brooks means is that the religion effect holds even when you control for those variables. 

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Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University.  You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.